As alluded to by Ed, Austin is spared from the worst instincts of its leftist municipal government by the state legislature (like Florida). No sanctuary cities, plastic bag bans, etc are allowed. Several years ago, the city banned ride shares (progressives against progress as I like to say), but the state stepped in and made them change. So, Austin residents can thank the state government for their ubereats robots.
Banning Airbnb and ridesharing in many "blue" cities has to do with protecting corporate taxi companies and hotels from competition mainly. All the lefty talk about hating corporations and "oligarchs" is just for show. Also, wherever a union is involved, the democrat party will do whatever the union wants, so in the case of Airbnb, the hotel workers complained.
Just to be clear, the politicians don't say, "hey we are protecting our corporate/union patrons, so no ride share for you". They say that it's unregulated, therefore unsafe so we are protecting you. Or, the drivers are being exploited, despite those drivers lining up to sign up for the gig work.
I'm an actual native Austinite. My family has been in Travis County since the mid-19th century and I qualify for membership in the Oak Hill Old Settlers Association. (Not trying to flaunt my pedigree, just a shout out to any other Old Settlers in the comments section.)
Naturally I live in Houston now because I can't afford to live in Austin. My consolation is that two roads in Austin bear my surname, not to mention the other streets bearing other family names. I can remember when some of them were dirt roads going through open pasture and I only qualified for Social Security this year.
"Houston and Dallas have grand art galleries, museum and concert halls, the legacy of previous generations, while Austin’s are notably mediocre."
That was my father's perennial complaint. Austin has always been the "second city" of Texas. San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston tried to compete with each other as well as other great US cities--New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia back in the day--but Austin always viewed urban greatness as an afterthought. It used to be that Austin was focused on a relaxed and pleasant life style, but now it’s obsessed with being cutting edge. I suppose now it's a first-tier provincial city. Well done, Austin.
San Antonio was Texas' first big city and it shows. It had a cosmopolitan population by the mid-19th century (Anglo American, Mexican American, and German American, roughly a 1/3 each) and built its cultural capital on this during the Victorian era. Germans played a crucial role building the American cultural legacy in the 19th century, it should be noted. (Shout out to the Germans in the comments section. I'm a good old British American but I give you props, as they kids say nowadays.)
San Antonio feels more like a city than any other big city of Texas. No grand museums but it has a well-established, albeit provincial (in a good way) cultural life and is happy to be itself. It's well worth a visit. I used to live there and it's my favorite Texas city, fwiw.
The White Lotus episode you mention would be much more accurate if it depicted a church going conservative
The White Lotus episode you mention would be much more accurate if it depicted a church going conservative lady in Austin who's out of step with her friends because everyone in Austin is secular and liberal.
Re: When I arrived in Austin, Texas it was close to 35 degrees, in mid-October;
Not quite so bad here in Florida. We're surrounded by water so that keeps the temperatures from hitting inland highs-- but also gives us killer humidity. In August it feels like one can swim through the air.
Re: Texas’s capital is among the fastest growing urban areas in the United States
It helps that it's in the middle of no where and so can expand in all directions with no one screaming "NIMBY!" except prairie dogs and tumbleweeds.
I don't know that IQ, a rather unreliable number (it varies over time), matters so much as certain credentials that prove pedigree, a certain cleverness and a lack of serious morals that enable one to be selfish and self-serving.
Re: New wealth may inevitably drive out the bohemians who gave the city its soul.
Something like that (on a smaller scale) happened in Ann Arbor MI, just in time for me to start college at the University of Michigan. In the 60s and the 70s the city was known as a hippie hang-out, home of the hash-bash and the stentorious campus protest, hosting a college circuit underground music scene where REM and Nirvana played before they became famous. But by the 80s its healthcare and tech businesses were bringing in a more sober populace and even the students, many of them children of privilege, were quieting down a lot. The place got serious about enforcing the 21 year old drinking age, the head shops shifted from paraphernalia to selling nostalgic 60s kitsch and the last straw was the basketball championship riot of 1989 when too many students got too jubilant over the UofM's victory and trashed downtown. Ann Arbor, as I said, became Anal Arbor all buttoned-up and scowling.
Re: elites don’t preach the conservatism they practise,
Oh, but they do. Apart from some bohemians who strike it rich in music or athletics, most of our rich are fairly dull, nose to the grindstone types. Yes, they have their eccentricities which they indulge, but they aren't "sex and drugs and rock-n-roll" hippies. Far from it. And when it comes to money they make the 19th century robber barons look like unmercenary saints.
Re: the mentally ill and addicted to gravitate to those offering the most hospitality – warm and blue.
There have been studies on this. The homeless gravitate from suburbs and rural ares to nearby big cities, but they don't tend to migrate cross country. There are to be sure those people who picked up stakes and moved to some distant place because they heard it had a booming economy and they hoped to cash in-- only to find they had no real marketable skills and so fell through the cracks and became homeless.
The Austin-SF contrast perfectly illustrates how conservative state leadership and deregulation deliver prosperity and innovation, while unchecked liberal policies lead to decline.
Texas is winning big!
America needs more of this model!
Meanwhile my blue state of Illinois languishes under incompetence and wrongheaded leftist claptrap and is in dire need of a politically cleansing enema.
But note that Austin does provide a degree of liberal cultural milieu which is also probably necessary for its success. Too conservative of a culture and innovation is strangled by anti-intellectual backwardness, prejudice and risk-adversity.
That is the paradox in our country. If you want to get away from progressive dysfunction in daily life, you have to give up the daily enjoyment of the cultural things that make life joyful and civilized.
Sounds like Austin has hit the sweet spot: a conservative state which keeps the lid on but a liberal city which allows for creativity and innovation. Sounds like there are affordability issues, but that's everywhere.
Have to say the causality of the air con -> industrious South looks a bit post hoc, ergo propter hoc to me. So much was happening in the USA around the turn of the last century to WWI, that I'm sure there are other factors.
it's very hard for very hot regions to compete without air-con. Singapore and UAE wouldn't have become so rich without them. I think it very unlikely the South would have been caught up to such an extent without it.
There is no way in hell (pun intended) Florida would be the fourth most populous state without AC. Even with it there's a fair number of people who spend only the cooler half of the year down here and scamper back up north after Easter.
"Lance Armstrong, who still has a bikeway named in his honour, I was surprised to learn" They still have a monument to Confederate soldiers in the grounds of the Capital Building! I took a photo of it when I visited (on a Friday Night Lights pilgrimage) ten years ago, and assumed it had been taken down in 2020, but apparently it's still standing, with its inscription that they "died for State rights".
I actually think that 'state's rights' is a sort of RW version of the midwit 'err it's complicated and nuanced' argument. It *was* about slavery! they seceded pretty much in order of the proportion of slaves they owned.
I'm not convinced about that. States' rights are real in the Constitution, as I understand it (being neither a lawyer nor American). It is supposed to be the United States and not Federal America. It's a limited government thing. And there are plenty of people who'll tell you the Civil War wasn't really about slavery, at all.
there was most certainly a legal argument for state's rights, and even some northern constitutionalists agreed they had good legal arguments, but the overwhelming cause was the divide between free states and slave states. It was driving the increasing tension about new admissions, after all, and the violence in Kansas.
I looked into this, and FWIW it was clear to me (as the descendant of a Confederate veteran buried in the State cemetery in Austin) that many Southerners before the war did in fact 1) state that they would fight to defend slavery; and during the war 2) state that they were fighting to defend slavery. After the war they were less willing to stand by their previous statements, naturally.
States' Rights were and continue to be an issue in our Federal system of government, but Slavery was the sine qua non of the war.
All the clashes over state rights issues (e.g., the tariff) were amenable to compromise and compromises were forged over them. Moreover the early 19th century Federal government was not exactly a juggernaut crushing the states. They had vastly more latitude to do as they pleased except where the Constitution forbade it.
When it comes to sheer hypocrisy the former slave states win a blue ribbon over the matter of escaped slaves where they demanded the Federal government force free states to return the escaped slaves to their masters and be damned to local laws on the matter. So much for states rights there. The Dred Scott decision (which basically set at naught free states' anti-slavery laws and dripped with racist malice in the process), convinced many Northerners that the South intended to dictate to the whole the country on the issue and states rights did not matter to the slaveholders.
I highly recommend reading Lincoln’s July 4, 1861 address to Congress. He basically said that a country where the minority threatens to take their ball and go home anytime they don’t get their way (or the fear of someday not getting their way in the case of the South) is not tolerable.
“It presents the question whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration according to organic law in any case, can always, upon the pretenses made in this case, or on any other pretenses, or arbitrarily without any pretense, break up their government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It forces us to ask, Is there in all republics this inherent and fatal weakness?”
Not really. At least before the Trumpian restoration the Supreme Court had been pushing back on Federal bullying for a while. Hence the ACA decision in which the Feds were told No, they could not extort the states on the Medicaid expansion. Alas, now the Trump and his gang want to remake the nation in their image, states rights are getting dumped overboard. See: the very recent executive order banning state level regulation of AI.
Like the 9th Amendment the 10th is more than a little vague since it does spell out the details and so we will have arguments over what it means (ditto the 9th too) for the open-ended future.
Yeah, the anti-slavery thing is hugely overstated. They weren’t heaving the oars on a galley, they had homes and jobs and families - but not FREEDOM!! To do what, in 19th century America? To enjoy FREEDOM!! Like William Wallace and the American Revolutionaries and the phenomenally successful Operation Enduring FREEDOM in Afghanistan, and closing mental hospitals and much else besides, it’s all about FREEDOM!!
It was also about a conception of states rights. “Nuance” allows both to be true. First one, and then the other. All of this is documented in great detail. All you have to do is open the book.
Thanks for the “shout out” to St John’s. Two of my children attended that Institution. One in Annapolis, one in Santa Fe. Best College in America. I wish I could have gone there.
Capitalism, for all its abundant benefits, does not lend itself to the creation of beauty. A real shame.
"Texas is mind-numbingly big, and this part of it is on the border of two climates, the desert of the West and the swamp of the Mississippi delta. As we walk past a river which looks like the sort of place you’d pick up a flesh-eating virus if you went for a swim, he points out a venomous snake."
Much of Texas's cities are located in a little known climate called the "humid subtropical". It has no dry season, hot, muggy summers, and cool winters. Out of all the Earth's climates, it is home to the largest number of people and has the biggest population density of any climatic zone:
Here in Florida we do have a dry season: fall and winter, albeit that does not mean no rain ever. But we have been in near-drought conditions this fall though last weekend we got some relief.
Where I live (ST Pete) we are right at the northern limit of where many tropicals (e..g, poincianas, papayas and bananas) will grow and the southern limit of where some dormancy-needing northern flora still can. We do get cold snaps, but actual freezes are uncommon and most winters that doesn't happen. If I drive up to my cousin's about an hour north of here there are far fewer palm trees, other than ones people have deliberately planted, and there's actually a degree of color change and leaf loss in the natural trees in late fall.
"...but this graduate demographic then insists on voting for policies driven by status competition in which empathy is a primary virtue. "
I have always thought that the "anti-woke" obsession with "empathy" as a driving force (https://cracksinpomo.substack.com/p/the-rights-strong-feelings-about) really sugar-coats their opponents. Much of their behaviour seems to be driven less by "empathy" by those perceived to be at the bottom than a vindictive desire to tear down those at the top and middle and make everyone equally oppressed! What Nietzsche called the "revenge" aspect of slave morality.
As Steve Sailer brilliantly put it:
"Personally, “dignity” would strike me as an odd characterization of such recent manifestations of identity politics as your local gay pride parade, Ferguson’s bouts of undocumented shopping, Bruce Jenner in a ball gown, or the Asia Argento vs. Rose McGowan #MeToo spat. Nor do I expect the upcoming Supreme Court nomination hearing/teen sex comedy to be a high point in the history of American dignity.
If I were looking for an alliterative subtitle, I might try instead “The Demand for Dominance.” Contemporary identity politics seem far less about Jackie Robinson maintaining a stiff upper lip as he demonstrates his right to play baseball than about Serena Williams feeling entitled to go off on the tennis umpire."
The days when stoicism was valued in this culture (apart from a few rebels like me) are far behind us. Perhaps it was buried with my father, who saw WWII up close and personal, and afterward buried three wives, a son and a daughter (and a teenage brother too), eventually declining by slow miserable inches with COPD-- yet somehow the man kept a pleasant disposition, a check on his temper and did very little whining ever.
Bit confused about 14th century Genoa making navigational instruments that allows sailors to “travel the world without the use of stars”. GPS has only been around for a few decades, Ed 🙂 Accurate clocks were the thing that first allowed them to judge longitude in the open sea, while the North Star mainly and the sun (also a star) were still useful in judging direction and latitude - the inventor of the marine chronometer, John Harrison, was an 18th century Englishman.
"way more patents"? What is this barbarous language you have picked up? Or should I say, y'all? (Oh noes, "way more lavish" too.)
What is this about "post-war British poetry"? The stuff hardly exists. Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was probably the last decent British poet. Much as I wish it were possible, I doubt a bookshop can survive on the works of Philip Larkin alone. But this leads to Austin's galleries being mediocre. Surely this is downstream of there being so little good post-war art? All the stuff you want to see has been bought by the galleries which were rich decades ago.
Still, another very good and informative article. Yeehaw, as they say.
I saw a Pointless episode the other day where the Q was something like “Name a post-war British poet whose works include The Whitsun Weddings and whose initials are PL”. The % of people who knew the answer: 3 🙁
Can't imagine chronically resentful British dysfunctionals, or schoolboys, allowing R2D2-lookalike Ubereats to move along the pavement unmolested.
good powers of prophecy https://x.com/yappappltd/status/2000283120025620531?s=46&t=VRWwVyy3m-L5qBTsrGVGvQ
Well, you could blow me down with a feather!
Well, we're just going to have to give those robots ray guns, along with a sink plunger to carry the Ubereats. Nothing can possibly go wrong.
Ah, like the Daleks! Gotta say, the idea of robots zapping the people who make life in Britain almost intolerable appeals to me greatly.
As alluded to by Ed, Austin is spared from the worst instincts of its leftist municipal government by the state legislature (like Florida). No sanctuary cities, plastic bag bans, etc are allowed. Several years ago, the city banned ride shares (progressives against progress as I like to say), but the state stepped in and made them change. So, Austin residents can thank the state government for their ubereats robots.
why would they ban ride shares? or am i being very naive.
Banning Airbnb and ridesharing in many "blue" cities has to do with protecting corporate taxi companies and hotels from competition mainly. All the lefty talk about hating corporations and "oligarchs" is just for show. Also, wherever a union is involved, the democrat party will do whatever the union wants, so in the case of Airbnb, the hotel workers complained.
Just to be clear, the politicians don't say, "hey we are protecting our corporate/union patrons, so no ride share for you". They say that it's unregulated, therefore unsafe so we are protecting you. Or, the drivers are being exploited, despite those drivers lining up to sign up for the gig work.
I'm an actual native Austinite. My family has been in Travis County since the mid-19th century and I qualify for membership in the Oak Hill Old Settlers Association. (Not trying to flaunt my pedigree, just a shout out to any other Old Settlers in the comments section.)
Naturally I live in Houston now because I can't afford to live in Austin. My consolation is that two roads in Austin bear my surname, not to mention the other streets bearing other family names. I can remember when some of them were dirt roads going through open pasture and I only qualified for Social Security this year.
"Houston and Dallas have grand art galleries, museum and concert halls, the legacy of previous generations, while Austin’s are notably mediocre."
That was my father's perennial complaint. Austin has always been the "second city" of Texas. San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston tried to compete with each other as well as other great US cities--New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia back in the day--but Austin always viewed urban greatness as an afterthought. It used to be that Austin was focused on a relaxed and pleasant life style, but now it’s obsessed with being cutting edge. I suppose now it's a first-tier provincial city. Well done, Austin.
San Antonio was Texas' first big city and it shows. It had a cosmopolitan population by the mid-19th century (Anglo American, Mexican American, and German American, roughly a 1/3 each) and built its cultural capital on this during the Victorian era. Germans played a crucial role building the American cultural legacy in the 19th century, it should be noted. (Shout out to the Germans in the comments section. I'm a good old British American but I give you props, as they kids say nowadays.)
San Antonio feels more like a city than any other big city of Texas. No grand museums but it has a well-established, albeit provincial (in a good way) cultural life and is happy to be itself. It's well worth a visit. I used to live there and it's my favorite Texas city, fwiw.
The White Lotus episode you mention would be much more accurate if it depicted a church going conservative
San Antonio also became home to cultural historian Jacques Barzun.
He knew a good thing when he saw it.
The White Lotus episode you mention would be much more accurate if it depicted a church going conservative lady in Austin who's out of step with her friends because everyone in Austin is secular and liberal.
Re: When I arrived in Austin, Texas it was close to 35 degrees, in mid-October;
Not quite so bad here in Florida. We're surrounded by water so that keeps the temperatures from hitting inland highs-- but also gives us killer humidity. In August it feels like one can swim through the air.
Re: Texas’s capital is among the fastest growing urban areas in the United States
It helps that it's in the middle of no where and so can expand in all directions with no one screaming "NIMBY!" except prairie dogs and tumbleweeds.
I don't know that IQ, a rather unreliable number (it varies over time), matters so much as certain credentials that prove pedigree, a certain cleverness and a lack of serious morals that enable one to be selfish and self-serving.
Re: New wealth may inevitably drive out the bohemians who gave the city its soul.
Something like that (on a smaller scale) happened in Ann Arbor MI, just in time for me to start college at the University of Michigan. In the 60s and the 70s the city was known as a hippie hang-out, home of the hash-bash and the stentorious campus protest, hosting a college circuit underground music scene where REM and Nirvana played before they became famous. But by the 80s its healthcare and tech businesses were bringing in a more sober populace and even the students, many of them children of privilege, were quieting down a lot. The place got serious about enforcing the 21 year old drinking age, the head shops shifted from paraphernalia to selling nostalgic 60s kitsch and the last straw was the basketball championship riot of 1989 when too many students got too jubilant over the UofM's victory and trashed downtown. Ann Arbor, as I said, became Anal Arbor all buttoned-up and scowling.
Re: elites don’t preach the conservatism they practise,
Oh, but they do. Apart from some bohemians who strike it rich in music or athletics, most of our rich are fairly dull, nose to the grindstone types. Yes, they have their eccentricities which they indulge, but they aren't "sex and drugs and rock-n-roll" hippies. Far from it. And when it comes to money they make the 19th century robber barons look like unmercenary saints.
Re: the mentally ill and addicted to gravitate to those offering the most hospitality – warm and blue.
There have been studies on this. The homeless gravitate from suburbs and rural ares to nearby big cities, but they don't tend to migrate cross country. There are to be sure those people who picked up stakes and moved to some distant place because they heard it had a booming economy and they hoped to cash in-- only to find they had no real marketable skills and so fell through the cracks and became homeless.
Excellent piece, Ed!
The Austin-SF contrast perfectly illustrates how conservative state leadership and deregulation deliver prosperity and innovation, while unchecked liberal policies lead to decline.
Texas is winning big!
America needs more of this model!
Meanwhile my blue state of Illinois languishes under incompetence and wrongheaded leftist claptrap and is in dire need of a politically cleansing enema.
But note that Austin does provide a degree of liberal cultural milieu which is also probably necessary for its success. Too conservative of a culture and innovation is strangled by anti-intellectual backwardness, prejudice and risk-adversity.
That is the paradox in our country. If you want to get away from progressive dysfunction in daily life, you have to give up the daily enjoyment of the cultural things that make life joyful and civilized.
Sounds like Austin has hit the sweet spot: a conservative state which keeps the lid on but a liberal city which allows for creativity and innovation. Sounds like there are affordability issues, but that's everywhere.
thanks!
whoops. already said that. going senile
thanks!
When Chicago, and Illinois more generally, goes bankrupt (which they are on the way to doing) the exodus South will really pickup.
"On the border between a desert zone and the Mississippi delta swamp."
Somehow, I'm not entranced.
Even by the stray reptiles.
and they have deadly spiders!
"Air conditioning changed all that, and as a result American life has become far more orientated towards the South."
Here's a good article on why warm and hot regions of the Earth have historically been poorer.
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/mountains
Have to say the causality of the air con -> industrious South looks a bit post hoc, ergo propter hoc to me. So much was happening in the USA around the turn of the last century to WWI, that I'm sure there are other factors.
it's very hard for very hot regions to compete without air-con. Singapore and UAE wouldn't have become so rich without them. I think it very unlikely the South would have been caught up to such an extent without it.
There is no way in hell (pun intended) Florida would be the fourth most populous state without AC. Even with it there's a fair number of people who spend only the cooler half of the year down here and scamper back up north after Easter.
That photo of Ed and Daniel made my Christmas season.
“Cowboy Ed West” has a great ring.
"Lance Armstrong, who still has a bikeway named in his honour, I was surprised to learn" They still have a monument to Confederate soldiers in the grounds of the Capital Building! I took a photo of it when I visited (on a Friday Night Lights pilgrimage) ten years ago, and assumed it had been taken down in 2020, but apparently it's still standing, with its inscription that they "died for State rights".
I was surprised too.
I actually think that 'state's rights' is a sort of RW version of the midwit 'err it's complicated and nuanced' argument. It *was* about slavery! they seceded pretty much in order of the proportion of slaves they owned.
I'm not convinced about that. States' rights are real in the Constitution, as I understand it (being neither a lawyer nor American). It is supposed to be the United States and not Federal America. It's a limited government thing. And there are plenty of people who'll tell you the Civil War wasn't really about slavery, at all.
there was most certainly a legal argument for state's rights, and even some northern constitutionalists agreed they had good legal arguments, but the overwhelming cause was the divide between free states and slave states. It was driving the increasing tension about new admissions, after all, and the violence in Kansas.
I looked into this, and FWIW it was clear to me (as the descendant of a Confederate veteran buried in the State cemetery in Austin) that many Southerners before the war did in fact 1) state that they would fight to defend slavery; and during the war 2) state that they were fighting to defend slavery. After the war they were less willing to stand by their previous statements, naturally.
States' Rights were and continue to be an issue in our Federal system of government, but Slavery was the sine qua non of the war.
All the clashes over state rights issues (e.g., the tariff) were amenable to compromise and compromises were forged over them. Moreover the early 19th century Federal government was not exactly a juggernaut crushing the states. They had vastly more latitude to do as they pleased except where the Constitution forbade it.
When it comes to sheer hypocrisy the former slave states win a blue ribbon over the matter of escaped slaves where they demanded the Federal government force free states to return the escaped slaves to their masters and be damned to local laws on the matter. So much for states rights there. The Dred Scott decision (which basically set at naught free states' anti-slavery laws and dripped with racist malice in the process), convinced many Northerners that the South intended to dictate to the whole the country on the issue and states rights did not matter to the slaveholders.
I highly recommend reading Lincoln’s July 4, 1861 address to Congress. He basically said that a country where the minority threatens to take their ball and go home anytime they don’t get their way (or the fear of someday not getting their way in the case of the South) is not tolerable.
“It presents the question whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration according to organic law in any case, can always, upon the pretenses made in this case, or on any other pretenses, or arbitrarily without any pretense, break up their government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It forces us to ask, Is there in all republics this inherent and fatal weakness?”
10th amendment. Completely ignored and trampled on.
Not really. At least before the Trumpian restoration the Supreme Court had been pushing back on Federal bullying for a while. Hence the ACA decision in which the Feds were told No, they could not extort the states on the Medicaid expansion. Alas, now the Trump and his gang want to remake the nation in their image, states rights are getting dumped overboard. See: the very recent executive order banning state level regulation of AI.
Like the 9th Amendment the 10th is more than a little vague since it does spell out the details and so we will have arguments over what it means (ditto the 9th too) for the open-ended future.
Yeah, the anti-slavery thing is hugely overstated. They weren’t heaving the oars on a galley, they had homes and jobs and families - but not FREEDOM!! To do what, in 19th century America? To enjoy FREEDOM!! Like William Wallace and the American Revolutionaries and the phenomenally successful Operation Enduring FREEDOM in Afghanistan, and closing mental hospitals and much else besides, it’s all about FREEDOM!!
And of course, FREEDOM Fries, that won the war in Iraq.
It was also about a conception of states rights. “Nuance” allows both to be true. First one, and then the other. All of this is documented in great detail. All you have to do is open the book.
Thanks for the “shout out” to St John’s. Two of my children attended that Institution. One in Annapolis, one in Santa Fe. Best College in America. I wish I could have gone there.
Capitalism, for all its abundant benefits, does not lend itself to the creation of beauty. A real shame.
"Texas is mind-numbingly big, and this part of it is on the border of two climates, the desert of the West and the swamp of the Mississippi delta. As we walk past a river which looks like the sort of place you’d pick up a flesh-eating virus if you went for a swim, he points out a venomous snake."
Much of Texas's cities are located in a little known climate called the "humid subtropical". It has no dry season, hot, muggy summers, and cool winters. Out of all the Earth's climates, it is home to the largest number of people and has the biggest population density of any climatic zone:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FHj71X_k8h0&pp=ygUZaHVtaWQgc3VidHJvcGljYWwgY2xpbWF0ZQ%3D%3D
Here in Florida we do have a dry season: fall and winter, albeit that does not mean no rain ever. But we have been in near-drought conditions this fall though last weekend we got some relief.
Yes. The southern tip of Florida has a tropical as opposed to subtropical climate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Florida
Where I live (ST Pete) we are right at the northern limit of where many tropicals (e..g, poincianas, papayas and bananas) will grow and the southern limit of where some dormancy-needing northern flora still can. We do get cold snaps, but actual freezes are uncommon and most winters that doesn't happen. If I drive up to my cousin's about an hour north of here there are far fewer palm trees, other than ones people have deliberately planted, and there's actually a degree of color change and leaf loss in the natural trees in late fall.
Thanks for the props. Humid Suptropicals such as myself don't get much recognitions. But we are mighty.
"...but this graduate demographic then insists on voting for policies driven by status competition in which empathy is a primary virtue. "
I have always thought that the "anti-woke" obsession with "empathy" as a driving force (https://cracksinpomo.substack.com/p/the-rights-strong-feelings-about) really sugar-coats their opponents. Much of their behaviour seems to be driven less by "empathy" by those perceived to be at the bottom than a vindictive desire to tear down those at the top and middle and make everyone equally oppressed! What Nietzsche called the "revenge" aspect of slave morality.
As Steve Sailer brilliantly put it:
"Personally, “dignity” would strike me as an odd characterization of such recent manifestations of identity politics as your local gay pride parade, Ferguson’s bouts of undocumented shopping, Bruce Jenner in a ball gown, or the Asia Argento vs. Rose McGowan #MeToo spat. Nor do I expect the upcoming Supreme Court nomination hearing/teen sex comedy to be a high point in the history of American dignity.
If I were looking for an alliterative subtitle, I might try instead “The Demand for Dominance.” Contemporary identity politics seem far less about Jackie Robinson maintaining a stiff upper lip as he demonstrates his right to play baseball than about Serena Williams feeling entitled to go off on the tennis umpire."
https://www.takimag.com/article/diversity-vs-dignity/
The days when stoicism was valued in this culture (apart from a few rebels like me) are far behind us. Perhaps it was buried with my father, who saw WWII up close and personal, and afterward buried three wives, a son and a daughter (and a teenage brother too), eventually declining by slow miserable inches with COPD-- yet somehow the man kept a pleasant disposition, a check on his temper and did very little whining ever.
Texas will be the refuge of enterprising people who want to be free, in the near future.
Bit confused about 14th century Genoa making navigational instruments that allows sailors to “travel the world without the use of stars”. GPS has only been around for a few decades, Ed 🙂 Accurate clocks were the thing that first allowed them to judge longitude in the open sea, while the North Star mainly and the sun (also a star) were still useful in judging direction and latitude - the inventor of the marine chronometer, John Harrison, was an 18th century Englishman.
Surely he meant the magnetic compass, which, as a flip phone owner, I still find invaluable.
Surely, the flip phone was the zenith of communication device design, as the great celestial navigator James Tiberius Kirk himself demonstrated …
"way more patents"? What is this barbarous language you have picked up? Or should I say, y'all? (Oh noes, "way more lavish" too.)
What is this about "post-war British poetry"? The stuff hardly exists. Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was probably the last decent British poet. Much as I wish it were possible, I doubt a bookshop can survive on the works of Philip Larkin alone. But this leads to Austin's galleries being mediocre. Surely this is downstream of there being so little good post-war art? All the stuff you want to see has been bought by the galleries which were rich decades ago.
Still, another very good and informative article. Yeehaw, as they say.
What I know about modern poetry could fit on a stamp. I was just following Daniel!
I saw a Pointless episode the other day where the Q was something like “Name a post-war British poet whose works include The Whitsun Weddings and whose initials are PL”. The % of people who knew the answer: 3 🙁
Would you ever move to America, Ed?
Don't think so, but I'm definitely coming back!
Very interesting. I haven't been to Austin since the early 1990s.